The Tempest (c.1508) (Detail)
By Giorgione.
Venice Academy. A masterpiece from
the Renaissance in Venice.

High
Renaissance Painting: Characteristics (c.1490-1530)

The style of Italian painting known as
"High Renaissance" represents
the summit of Renaissance art and
the culmination of all the exploratory activities of the quattrocento.
It is characterized above all by the qualities of harmony and balance.
Although movement is both necessary and important, it is always dignified
and calm, and the viewer's eye is always provided with a point of focus.
The picture is invariably totally balanced and self-contained, so that
it satisfies the definition of beauty as offered by Leon
Battista Alberti (1404-72) in his treatise Della Pittura: "such
complete harmony of parts to which nothing can be added or taken away
without destroying the whole." High Renaissance painting is neither
as intense nor as self-conscious as that of the Early Renaissance. Nor
is it as contrived as so much of Mannerist
painting was to be. In respect of its evident calm and monumentality
it is often bracketed with High
Classical Greek Sculpture of the 5th century BCE.

Detail from, The School of Athens
(1509-11), in the Raphael
Rooms at
the Vatican Palace, Showing Plato
and Aristotle.

Its greatest exponents were the Florentine
geniuses Leonardo da Vinci
and Michelangelo,
together with the Urbino master Raffaello Santi - known as Raphael
- and the Venetian colourist Tiziano Vecellio - known as Titian.
Other important High Renaissance painters include Andrea
del Sarto (1486-1530) and Fra
Bartolommeo (1472-1517) in Florence, Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516),
Giorgione (1477-1510) and Sebastiano
del Piombo (1485-1547) in Venice. That said, the story of the High
Renaissance is closely associated with the Renaissance
in Rome, where ambitious Popes including Julius II (1503-13) and Leo
X (1513-21) financed a wide range of public
art projects to ensure that the city surpassed Florence as the greatest
cultural centre in Italy. In fact, both Florence and Rome became key stop-overs
in the European Grand Tour of the 18th century.
Important artists active outside the major centres, include Antonio Allegri
da Correggio (1489-1534), the creator of the highly influential fresco
the Assumption
of the Virgin (Parma Cathedral) (1526-30).

Leonardo Da Vinci
(c.1490 onwards)

The advanced style of painting
practiced by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan was continued with modifications
in Lombardy by his principal Milanese follower Bernardino Luini (c.1480-1532)
and others. It found no immediate converts in his native Florence, however,
even though his unfinished panel
painting "Adoration of the Magi" remained close by
the city, in the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto. Some contemporaries
of Leonardo, such as Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Filippino
Lippi did imitate the broad outlines of the picture, but they failed
to absorb its deeper and more innovational features. The real impact of
Leonardo's painting was seen only when he returned to Florence in 1500.
Fellow artists and members of the public flocked to the church of the
Santissima Annunziata to see his full-scale study for The Virgin and
Child with St. Anne. His great mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari
(1503-06) competed with work by his rival Michelangelo in a civic competition
to record the history of Florence. Neither the panel nor the mural was
ever finished. Even so, his art left an abiding impression on his native
city. More was to come. His masterpiece Mona
Lisa (La Gioconda), now in the Louvre, revolutionized portraiture,
with its innovative shading technique - sfumato.
(See also his earlier Lady
with an Ermine, 1490, Czartoryski Museum, Krakow.) Among those
greatly influenced by Leonardo's handling of light and shade was Fra Bartolommeo
(1472-1517), later leader of the Florentine High Renaissance.

In addition, his Renaissance
drawings stimulated both fellow artists to make similar preparatory
studies for their paintings, and patrons to collect them. Above all, his
reputation as an artist - who was also a scientist and scholar - rubbed
off on his fellow artists, leading to improved opportunities and status
for all.

Raphael (1483-1520)

The artist who assimilated most from the
painting of Leonardo was undoubtedly Raphael. Son of the painter and writer
Giovanni Santi, he was greatly influenced in his early days by Perugino
(1450-1523). At the age of 21 he came to Florence as a respected artist,
only to discover to his consternation that everything he had learned was
old-fashioned and ultimately provincial. His immediate response was to
set about learning the new style from the Florentines, including provincial
artists working in Florence, such as Luca
Signorelli (1450-1523). Out went his old style of drawing,
with its tight contours and interior hatching; in came the more flowing
style of Leonardo. From a close study of Leonardo's Virgin
of the Rocks he came up with a new type of Madonna set against
a soft and gentle landscape (The Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi).
He borrowed the format of Leonardo's Mona Lisa for his portrait
paintings, and he also made a meticulous study of Michelangelo's sculpture.
Within 5 years, by the time he left for Rome in 1509, Raphael had absorbed
all Florence had to offer and was poised to make his own artistic statement.

Located on the upper floor of the Vatican
palace, the Stanza della Segnatura was used by the ageing pontiff
Pope Julius II (1503-13) as a library. It
was here, between 1509 and 1511, that Raphael painted his famous fresco
The School of Athens.
It was the room's second mural painting
to be completed, after La Disputa, on the opposite wall, and is
regarded as one of the clearest and finest examples of the High Renaissance
style. In this work, like Leonardo before him, Raphael creates a balance
between the movement of the figures and the order and stability of the
pictorial space. He populated the composition with numerous figures in
a diverse variety of poses, yet manipulated these poses so as to finally
lead the eye of the spectator to the central pair of Plato and Aristotle
whom he made the converging point of his system of linear
perspective. A masterful example of High Renaissance painterly technique.
See also his wonderfully harmonious Sistine
Madonna (1513-14, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister Dresden).

Raphael's style continued to influence
generations of artists in Rome and elsewhere. See, for instance, the work
of Carlo Maratta (1625-1713),
the leader Catholic artist after Bernini.

Michelangelo
(1475-1564)

While the 26-year old Raphael was frescoing
the Vatican apartments, the 33-year old Michelangelo Buonarroti was (against
his will) decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12) with
his Genesis
fresco. Although trained in fresco
painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio - and influenced by others like Luca
Signorelli - and despite having painted several high quality panels (eg.
Tondo Doni, 1504-06), Michelangelo really saw himself as a sculptor.
He actually began painting his Genesis fresco in collaboration with a
number of other High Renaissance
artists whom he knew from Ghirlandaio's workshop, but soon dismissed
them, and painted the entire ceiling alone. Over the next four years (1508-12),
he decorated some 1,000 square-metres of ceiling with a seething mass
of brightly coloured figures, illustrating scenes from the biblical Book
of Genesis, as well as others from the Old Testament and Classical mythology.
One of these religious paintings
- entitled The Creation
of Adam - in which the kinetic energy of God the Creator contrasts
vividly with the flaccid lifeless form of Adam - is regarded by many scholars
as Christianity's greatest pictorial work. The Sistine ceiling was acclaimed
as a masterpiece in its own time, and its creator was henceforth known
as Michelangelo "Il divino", the divine Michelangelo.
Contemporaries talked of his awesome power ("terribilita")
and divine genius. These three artists - Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo
- played a pivotal role in raising the status of the painter (and his
disegno) to a new level, on
a par with architects and similar experts. As it was, their enormous achievements
set standards that were impossible to surpass - a factor which contributed
to the emergence of the anti-classical style of Mannerism
(c.1530-1600).

Dispersal of
the High Renaissance Threesome

By 1513, the year of Julius II's death
and the accession of Pope Leo X, the three greatest painters of the Italian
High Renaissance were occupied with new projects that diverted them from
their previous paths. Leonardo was at the French court in Milan, where
he devoted himself to refining the Mona Lisa, writing his treatises
and working on tasks for the French monarch. Italian patrons meanwhile
had become wary of his relentless curiosity - a double-edged quality which
resulted in most of his projects being left unfinished. Michelangelo was
sculpting the tomb of Julius II in Rome; in 1516 he returned to Florence
to complete a number of sculptural and architectural jobs for the Medici
family. As for Raphael, he was becoming overloaded with administrative
duties as the architect overseeing the construction of the new St. Peter's
Basilica. As his workload increased, he began to depend more and more
on Giulio Romano (c.1499-1546)
and his other assistants. As a result only a handful of paintings were
completed by his own hand during the period 1514-20. One of these was
the glorious Sistine Madonna (1513-14, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister
Dresden), surely one of his greatest paintings.

Note: A great deal of the pioneering
work on the attribution of paintings during the High Renaissance era,
was done by the art historian Bernard
Berenson (1865-1959), who lived most of his life near Florence,
and published a number of highly influential works on the Italian
Renaissance in Florence and elsewhere.

Mannerist Tendencies
(c.1512 onwards)

Raphael's later Vatican frescoes in the
Stanza d'Elidoro (1512-14) already show Mannerist tendencies -
see, for instance The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temples
and the Liberation of St. Peter. One of his last (unfinished) works,
The Transfiguration
(1518-20, Pinacoteca Apostolica, Vatican, Rome) also shows unmistakable
signs of Mannerist expressionism. In fact, some art historians believe
that the dramatic tension contained within Raphael's figures, allied to
his strong use of chiaroscuro,
anticipates Baroque painting.

Leonardo's death in 1519, followed swiftly
by that of the 37-year old Raphael in 1520, left Il Divino Michelangelo
as the sole surviving genius of the Italian Renaissance. Fully occupied
with Medici matters until 1527, when the powerful family was expelled
from Florence, and then again from 1530 to 1534, it wasn't until 1534
that he settled in Rome. In the meantime, the High Renaissance world in
which he had matured as an artist had changed out of all proportion. Rome
had been sacked (1527) by troops of Emperor Charles V - who forced the
Pope to abandon the Vatican and flee to Orvieto - and Florence besieged.
Furthermore, the principles of High Renaissance Humanist philosophy had
been overtaken by the rise of Northern Protestantism and its clash with
the militant Catholic Counter-Reformation was on the horizon. Not surprisingly,
this collapse of High Renaissance idealism is reflected in the dramatic
content, swirling movement, and distorted forms of Michelangelo's Last
Judgment fresco (1534-41) on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel
- now regarded as the greatest masterpiece of religious
art of the 16th century. As soon as the fresco was unveiled in 1541
it became a model for young artists. [In 1586, the painter Armenini, recollected
how, as a young man, when he was drawing in the Sistine Chapel, he would
overhear discussions about minute details of Michelangelo's work. It became
a school for anatomy, the best place in Rome to study the male
nude figure.] After capturing the mood of the moment with his thundering
'Last Judgment God', who seemed more concerned with condemning the human
race than in welcoming the blessed into heaven, Michelangelo completed
two final frescoes for the Farnese Pope Paul III's private chapel (Cappella
Paolina) - the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion
of St. Peter. The figures in these works are even more Mannerist than
those in the Last Judgment. Given his aesthetic and spiritual doubts,
it is perhaps no surprise that in his final 20 years Michelangelo largely
abandoned painting and sculpture to focus on architecture.

High Renaissance
Ideals Outside Rome and Florence

The ideals or aesthetics
of the High Renaissance - as illustrated by the compositions of Leonardo,
Raphael, and Michelangelo - continued to evolve outside the two major
centres of Rome and Florence. In Parma, for instance, Correggio
(1489-1534) was strongly influenced by Andrea
Mantegna (1430-1506) and Leonardo's Milanese followers. His Rest
on the Flight into Egypt (Uffizi, Florence) and the Madonna of
the Bowl (1525, National Gallery, Parma) are clearly executed in the
idiom of the High Renaissance. Even so, Correggio is probably best known
for his soaring frescoes on the duomo of Parma Cathedral (1524-30) and
in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista - which provided a perfect model
for the illusionistic quadratura
and other trompe l'oeil
devices of later Baroque painting - and for his late series of sensuous
Mannerist-style paintings such as Jupiter
and Io (1532-3, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). See Parma
School of painting, for more details.

Venetian High Renaissance
Painting

During the late quattrocento, painting
in Venice followed a similar type of path to that of the Renaissance
in Florence, albeit with a Venetian twist. Giovanni Bellini's Madonnas
of 1505-10, for instance, are stylistically quite similar to those painted
by Raphael in Florence at about the same time. His San Zaccaria altarpiece
("Enthroned Madonna with Four Saints") (1505) endows
the theme of the sacra conversazione with a definite High Renaissance
flavour. Giovanni Bellini
(1430-1516) was the dominant force in Venetian
painting by the 1490s, and his style had a huge impact on younger
painters such as Giorgione and Titian, as well as Lorenzo
Lotto (1480-1556). In any event, Venetian painters traditionally attached
more importance to luminosity of colour (partly a result of their expertise
with oil paint), as well as compositional expressiveness - in contrast
to the more rarified classical style of painting practiced in Rome. For
more about altarpiece art during the High Renaissance, see: Venetian
altarpieces (c.1500-1600); for portraiture, see: Venetian
Portrait Painting (c.1400-1600). See also: Titian
and Venetian Colour Painting (c.1500-76). See also: Legacy
of Venetian Painting on European art.

Giorgione (1477-1510)

Giorgione
learned an enormous amount from Bellini, but then far exceeded his master
to create a type of lyrical landscape
painting that can only be compared with pastoral poetry. In his short
career this innovative young painter gave his contemporaries a master-class
in how to exploit the medium of oil paint to create the illusion of textures
and light in their paintings. His earliest work, the Madonna and Child
with Saints Francis and Liperale (c.1504, Castelfranco Cathedral),
borrows heavily from Bellini. Yet within a few years Giorgione moved from
this style of painting, via the mysterious and foreboding Tempest
(c.1505, Venice Academy
Gallery), to the lyrical Sleeping
Venus (1510, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) and the dreamy
Pastoral Concert (c.1510, Louvre). The last mentioned picture reveals
the Venetian love of texture, for he renders exactly the contrasting textures
of flesh, fabric, stone, wood and foliage. Giorgione's soft, diffused
light, together with his gentle landscape - hills stretching into the
distance and all harsh contours removed, creates a perfectly pastoral
mood: a technique which became characteristic of Venetian painting of
the 16th century and one of great importance in the evolution of Baroque
art.

Titian (c.1488-1576)

The impact of Giorgione on Venetian art
was immediate, and on none more so than Titian. Although not a student
of Giorgione, he collaborated with him on one project and completed a
number of his paintings. In his Sacred and Profane Love (1512-15,
Borghese Gallery, Rome) Titian shows himself capable of rivaling Giorgione
using Giorgione's own painting techniques. If the Giorgione's influence
is particularly evident in Titian's profane paintings, Bellini's is visible
in the religious paintings, and he continued to act as Titian's teacher
and rival until his death in 1516 - some 6 years after the demise of Giorgione
- when Titian himself emerged as the leading figure in Venetian painting.

Titian's inspirational Assumption
of the Virgin (1516-18, S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice),
established him as Bellini's successor. Reflecting the Venetian love of
colour in painting, its balance
and movement - despite certain obvious Mannerist elements - is comparable
with that of Raphael's School of Athens, in both its conception
and grandeur. The Assumption - together with Sacred and Profane
Love (1512-15), The Entombment of Christ (1523-26, Louvre,
Paris) and the Pesaro Madonna (1519-26; Santa Maria dei Frari)
- exemplifies Titian's contribution to High Renaissance art. Once in his
40s - with the exception of occasional calm compositions like Venus
of Urbino (1538, Uffizi, Florence) - Titian moved further and
further away from the High Renaissance idiom.

Titian's late works carry the oil medium
to new heights. His painterly methods included: full use of preparatory
studies and drawings to enable him to create paintings that look as if
they have been freshly painted in the heat of inspiration; the use of
loosely juxtaposed patches of colour; paint applied freely and loosely
with the brush and then reworked with his fingers.

Two late works in particular show the scope
of Titian's genius. The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (c.1548-50, Church
of the Jesuits, Venice), painted when the artist was 60, shows all the
enthusiasm of youth. Notice the Mannerist foreshortening
and exaggeration, as well as his handling of light, which are used to
emphasize the dramatic and emotional content of the painting. The same
intensity of drama, light, and colour can be seen in Rape of Europa
(c. 1559-62; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) - a style which
prefigured the work of Rubens and the Baroque. Titian's long and magisterial
career had an enormous impact on Mannerist
artists in Venice. The city's other two great painters of the 16th
century, Paolo Veronese
and Tintoretto, each focused
on a different aspect of Titian's style of painting and developed it.